Last-Minute Holiday Gifts

Must-haves for anyone with a digital camera.

Dave Johnson

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Feature: Last-Minute Holiday Gifts

I love everything about this time of year. In my house, I get no fewer than three lavish holiday feasts in the space of six weeks. All the restaurants start serving muffins, pies, and ice cream in my favorite flavor (pumpkin) and, of course, there are all those exciting gifts to open.

I know what I want this year. But in case you're still adding to your own holiday wish list, or you're searching for goodies to give to your favorite digital photographer, read on for this year's edition of my last-minute holiday gift ideas.

New Image Editing Programs

It must be that time of year, because the big image editing suites have been "revved." You can read about all the new programs in "Do More With Digital Photos."

Adobe has released Photoshop Elements 3, which integrates some clever new tools and the formerly stand-alone Photoshop Album image organizer. I found it for about $80 to $100 at the PC World Product Finder.

Microsoft offers Digital Image Suite 10, which adds a sophisticated color toolset that improves on traditional Level and Curve controls, plus an insanely easy panorama stitching tool that automatically arranges the pictures in the right sequence for you. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Microsoft employee.) It's selling for about $100 to $135.

The newest version of Ulead's PhotoImpact 10 has a very cool feature that lets you "stack" pictures with different exposure settings to capture images that have a dramatically higher exposure range than would generally be possible. It's available at the Ulead Web site for $90.

And Jasc rolled out Paint Shop Pro 9--right before the whole company became a part of Corel in October. The updated package comes complete with a phenomenal "undo anything" feature that lets you selectively undo a single step in the undo history without reverting the entire process. I found it for about $90 to $120 at the PC World Product Finder.

Stocking Stuffers

Looking for something less expensive than an image editor? You can't go wrong giving someone a media card to expand their shooting capacity. Flash memory like CompactFlash and Secure Digital Card has never been cheaper, making this a good year to put 256MB or 512MB in someone's stocking. At PC World's Product Finder, I found a 256MB SD Card for--are you sitting down?--less than $30. Likewise, you can find a 1GB card for about $70 and up. I still cringe when I remember how I spent $500 for a 1GB card just a couple of years ago.

Know what goes great with media cards? An external reader for your desktop PC--you could put away your camera's USB cable and just copy pictures via the card. You can't help but trip over these devices at any computer or office supply store. Make sure that the one you buy is USB 2.0 compatible; it should be a lot faster than a USB 1.1 device (assuming that the computer has a USB 2.0 port). I like SanDisk's ImageMate 8-in-1 Reader/Writer, which sells for about $20 to $40.

Memory cards and memory card readers are certainly appreciated--sort of like the way people appreciate socks and ties--but if you want to give a memorable gift, give something unusual that'll spark a little creativity. Try a special effects lens from Lensbabies, for instance. The company's add-on lens works with a variety of different cameras to let you selectively blur certain parts of a picture. You can order a Lensbaby for $96 at the company's Web site.

An add-on flash can also get the creative juices flowing. For example, a slave flash like the Phoenix D91-BZS ($99) can be set to fire anytime your camera's built-in flash goes off, dramatically extending your range. I reviewed this model not too long ago.

Get a Good Book

Finally, it's time for my annual plug. My editor lets me do this only once a year, and even then it's only because I send him a fruitcake. If you know someone who just got a new digital camera, what better gift than a copy of my best-selling book, How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera (McGraw-Hill/Osbourne, 2003, 877/833-5524)? It's $16 well spent--and it's eligible for free shipping if included in a $25 order from Amazon.com.

Dave's Favorites: Put Photos and Videos in Your Pocket

Here's a quandary: How do you show off your digital photos to friends, family, and coworkers? You can use e-mail, Web sites, and slide shows on CD, but none of those options really let you hand someone a bunch of pictures and examine them in quite the same way as a stack of prints. Well, now there's another option.

I've been playing with the Creative Zen Portable Media Center for a few weeks, and it's pretty much everything I've ever wanted in a handheld entertainment gadget. It does it all: music, pictures, and video. The Zen has a 3.8-inch color screen, a built-in 20GB hard drive, and anywhere from 7 to 22 hours of battery life, depending upon how you use it (you get more battery life from picture or music playback, and less from videos).

The Zen is not the first gadget to offer these kinds of features--I like the Archos AV400, for instance--but the Zen is the very first handheld I've ever had that makes it amazingly easy to get content on and off the device. Just plug it in to your PC via a USB cable, and it communicates intelligently with Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10. Drag a bunch of music, pictures, and videos into WMP's Sync List, then click the Sync button. That's all there is to it.

So here's the Zen at work: I drag a bunch of pictures onto the device and take it on the road. When I want to show off my pictures with style, I start playing a song from my MP3 collection and then fire up my pictures in slide-show mode. When I'm done, I can even watch home videos recorded with my camcorder or TV shows downloaded on my PC.

If I had one complaint, it would be that the Zen is a bit large. It weighs 12 ounces, which is just a handful of coins shy of a pound. And measuring 5.7 by 3.2 by 1.1 inches, it doesn't really fit in your pocket--unless you have oversized pockets, that is. But if fashion isn't your top concern, give the Zen a look. It's not cheap: It lists for $499, but I found it for about $460 at PC World's Product Finder. PC World also took a look at Creative's media player; read "First Look: Creative Zen Portable Media Center" for another take on it.

Q&A: Setting a Playback Order for CD Slide Shows

I am having a problem burning a CD of my photos, and I do not know whether it is the fault of my burner or the photo editing software. It happens all of the time and I have tried everything that I can think of to correct the problem. Here's an example: I just returned from vacation with about 500 pictures that I sorted into a particular order. I then burned them to a CD-R and they appeared in a different sequence. I don't know why this happens, but I have never been able to burn a CD of my photos that ended up in the order I wanted. Any suggestions?

--Charles Wehland, Geneva, Illinois

I think I know what your problem is, Charles. You don't say which editing program you're using or exactly what kind of disc you're trying to burn, but I assume you are using your image editing program to simply copy the pictures to CD--not to make some sort of fancy multimedia extravaganza in a custom slide-show program.

If that's the case, you can't control the order in which the pictures are copied to the CD. They appear on your disc in alphabetical order, plain and simple. So here's my advice: After you arrange your pictures "just so," rename them sequentially, perhaps with a number at the start of every file name. That way, when you send them all to CD, they'll keep the order you established in your image editor.

Hot Pics

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Tiger," by Tim Gorman, Rockford, Illinois

About this week's Hot Pic, Tim says: "I took this photo at the Milwaukee County Zoo. It was a very warm day and I had already taken a couple of pictures of this tiger cooling off in his pond, when he fixed his gaze on something floating on the water. My wife and I have always had cats as pets and I immediately recognized the look of a cat about to pounce, so I mashed down the shutter button. The camera was already set for continuous shooting mode just in case something interesting happened, and I fired off about five frames. I like this one, from the middle of the sequence, the best."

Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For our November winner, we chose "Splash," by Tammy Whitaker from The Colony, Texas.

Congratulations to Tammy and to everyone else who won a Hot Pic of the Week last month. Keep those entries coming!